CALL me a sap, but really, how can you not love the tacky formality of the dopey royals and their ghastly affairs?

Cheating on your wife is practically a right of passage for that bunch – beginning with Henry VIII, who created a whole new religion so he could sleep with the reluctant debutante Anne Boleyn.

And the royals have been sleeping with and intermarrying each other so much since then that if Diana hadn’t come along to bring some better genes into the family, they would have all ended up looking like they fell out of “Deliverance” – with better suits.

(Think Prince Charles, please. Can you imagine what his kids would have looked like if he’d actually married “Winged Victory” aka Camilla Parker Bowles? Eyes so close together they’d need monocles to see!)

Co-produced with Granada TV, it stars a bunch of Brits most of us don’t know, who don’t look much like any of the characters in that tacky affair, but hey, who cares? It’s a perfect movie for this time of year, when our thoughts turn to shopping and drinking.

It begins with young Prince Charles (Laurence Fox), who is such a huge loser that he can’t get any girls except for sluts and nudie pinups from cheesy men’s magazines.

Anyway, he runs across Camilla (Olivia Poulet), who looks in this production horrifyingly like Sarah Ferguson.

Charlie falls madly in love with Camy, and she falls madly in like with him. She is one of those English women that American actresses/socialites in 1930s movies used to copy – all wise mouth, no inhibitions, and tedibly, tedibly frank, dahling.

Meantime, her affair with him doesn’t interfere with her affair with Andrew Parker Bowles.

Mid-affair Charles’ dad, Prince Phillip, the world’s coldest man, tells him he has to go in the armed services, and Charles writes Camilla sappy love notes telling her how depressed he is without her. No wonder she ran away from him. What a whiney wimp!

So, while he’s off at sea, Camilla marries Parker Bowles, who is not much of a husband, but a lot more fun.

But whiney won’t go away, so when Camilla gets fed up with her husband sleeping with everyone in the country, she relents and starts sleeping with Charles.

With the pressure on the future king to find a future queen, Camilla helps his sister, Anne, pluck Diana for Charles.